The Day After Roswell (8 page)

However we were going to camouflage our development of the Roswell technology, it had to be within the existing way we
did business so no one would recognize any difference. We operated on a
normal defense development projects budget of well into the billions in
1960, most of it allocated to the analysis of new weapons systems. Just
within our own bureau we had contracts with the nation’s
biggest defense companies with whom we maintained almost daily
communication. A lot of the research we conducted was in the
improvement of existing weapons based on the intelligence we received
about what our enemies were pointing at us: faster tanks, heavier
artillery, improved helicopters, better tasting MREs.

At the Foreign Technologies desk, we kept an eye on what other
countries were doing, ally or adversary, and how we could adapt it to
our use. The French, the Italians, the West Germans, all of them had
their own weapons systems and streams of development that seemed exotic
by our standards yet had certain advantages. The Russians had gotten
ahead of us in liquid rocket propulsion systems and were using simpler,
more efficient designs. My job was to evaluate the potential of the
foreign technology and implement whatever we could. I’d get
photos, designs, and specs of foreign weapons systems, like the French
helicopter technology, for example, and bring it to American defense
companies like Bell, Sikorski, or Hughes to see whether we could
develop aspects of it for our own use. And it was the perfect cover for
protecting the Roswell technology, but we still had to figure out what
we wanted to do with it. It couldn’t simply stay in file
cabinets or on shelves forever.

What we had retrieved from the Roswell crash and had managed
to hold on to was probably the most closely guarded secret the army
had. Yet it was nothing more than an orphan. Up until 1961, the army
had come up with no plan to use the technology without revealing its
nature or its source and in so doing blow the cover on the single
biggest secret the government was keeping. There was no one bureau
within the army charged with managing Roswell and other aspects of UFO
encounters, as there was in the air force, and therefore nobody was
keeping any public records of how the army got its hands on its Roswell
technology in the first place and, consequently, no oversight
mechanism. Everything up until 1961 was catch-as-catch-can, but now it
had to change. General Trudeau was looking for the grand end game
development scheme. It began with researching the history of how the
whole file - the field reports,

autopsy information, descriptions of the items found in the
wreckage, and the bits and pieces of Roswell technology themselves -
came into the possession of Army R&D.

Luckily enough for me, the whole Roswell story was still
unknown outside the highest military circles in 1961. Retired major
Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer at the 509th who had been at the
crash site in July 1947 and who had given the initial reports of a
spacecraft, would not yet tell his story in public for at least another
ten years. Everyone else connected to the incident was either dead or
sworn to silence.

The air force, which moved quickly to take over management of
the Roswell affair and ongoing UFO contacts and sightings, still kept
everything they learned highly classified under the Air Force
Intelligence Command and waged a push and pull war with the CIA for
information about sightings and ongoing contacts with anything
extraterrestrial. These really weren’t my concerns yet, but
they would be.

My research was not concerned with the crash at Roswell
itself, nor at Corona or at San Agustin - if those crashes did, in
fact, occur in early July 1947 - but on the day after Roswell, the day
Bill Blanchard from the 509th crated up the alien debris and shipped it
to Fort Bliss, where Gen. Roger Ramey’s staff determined its
final disposition and the official government history of the event
began to unfold.

In the early hours after the cargo arrived in Texas, there was
so much confusion about what was found and what wasn’t found
that army officers, who were in charge of the entire retrieval
operation, quickly scraped together both a cover story and a plan to
silence all the military and civilian witnesses to the recovery. The
cover story was easy. General Ramey ordered Maj. Jesse Marcel to recant
his “flying saucer” story and pose for a news photo
with debris from a weather balloon, which he described as the wreckage
the retrieval team recovered from outside Roswell. Marcel followed
orders and the flying saucer officially became a weather balloon.

The silencing of military witnesses was also accomplished
easily enough through top-down orders from General Ramey to everyone at
the 509th and at Fort Bliss to deny that they were a part of any
operation to recover anything other than a balloon. Once the material
left Ramey’s command and arrived at Lt. Gen. Nathan
P.Twining’s Air Material Command at Wright Field, all General Ramey had to do was keep denying what he was already denying
and it was no longer his responsibility. Now it belonged to General
Twining, from whose desk a whole new era of army involvement with the
Roswell material began.

General Ramey treated the incident as a threat to national
security and deployed whatever forces he could to bring the material
back for evaluation and to suppress any rumors that might light a
brushfire of panic. Therefore, Ramey used the counter intelligence
personnel already posted to the 509th and ordered them deployed into
the civilian community as well as the military to use any means
necessary to suppress the story of the crash and retrieval. No news
should be allowed to get out, no speculation was to be tolerated, and
the story already circulating about a crashed flying saucer had to be
quashed.

By the next morning, July 8, the suppression of the crash
story was in full operation. The army had already issued a new cover
story to the press by the time CIC officers had gotten to the witnesses
and, using threats and outright promises of cash, forced them to recant
their statements about what they saw. Rancher Mac Brazel, who first
said he had been at the site during the recovery and had described the
strange debris, disappeared for two days and then showed up in town
driving a new pickup truck and denying he’d ever seen
anything. CIC officers turned up at people’s houses and spoke
quietly to parents about what their children had learned. Whatever
people thought was happening, army personnel said, wasn’t,
and it would have to stay that way.

“You didn’t see a thing, ” they
ordered. “Nothing happened here. Let me hear you repeat that.
”

The silencing worked so well that for the next thirty years
the story seemed to have been swallowed up by the quiet emptiness of
desert where all things are worn down to a fine grade of sameness. But
belying the quiet that settled over Roswell, a thousand miles away,
part of the U.S. military went on wartime alert as bits and pieces of
the craft reached their destinations. One of those destinations, Lt.
Gen. Nathan Twining’s desk at Wright Field, was the focal
point from which the Roswell artifacts would reach the Foreign
Technology desk at the Pentagon.

Among the first of the army’s top commands notified
of the events unfolding in Roswell in early July would have had to have
been Lieutenant General Twining’s Air Material Command at
Wright Field, where the Roswell debris was shipped. Nathan Twining has
become important to UFO researchers because of his association with a
number of highly secret meetings at the Eisenhower White House having
to do with the national security issues posed by the discovery of UFOs
and his relationship to National Security Special Assistant Robert
Cutler, who was the liaison between the NSC and President Eisenhower
when I was on the NSC staff in the 1950s. The silver-haired General
Twining was the point man for initial research and dissemination of
Roswell related materials and, partly because of the capability with
which he administered the vital AMC at Wright, he became part of an ad
hoc group of top military and civilian officials assembled by President
Truman to advise him about the Roswell discovery and its national
security implications.

General Twining had been scheduled to travel to the West Coast
in early July 1947, but he canceled the trip, remaining in New Mexico
at the army’s air base at Alamogordo until at least July 10.
Alamogordo was important not just because it was the nation’s
nuclear weapons test site in the 1940s and 1950s but because it was
also a field office of the AMC itself, where rocket scientists Wernher
von Braun and others were primarily based. Close by was the White Sands
guided missile base, where some of our military’s most
advanced tracking and embryonic targeting radars were deployed. These
were sensitive installations, especially during the UFO activity that
week, and it made perfect sense that immediately after the recovery of
the UFO the army general whose responsibility it would have been to
manage the retrieval was almost directly on-site conferring with his
top scientists.

Although I never saw the actual memos from President Truman to
General Twining regarding his trip to New Mexico, I had heard stories
about secret orders that Truman had issued to General Twining directing
him to New Mexico to investigate the reports of the crash and to report
directly to the White House on what he’d found. I believe
that it was General Twining’s initial report to the President
that confirmed that the army had retrieved something from the desert
and might have suggested the need for the formation of an advisory
group to develop policy about whatever was discovered. And, remember,
in those first forty-eight hours, nobody really knew what this was.

By the time the Roswell debris had been shipped out of Fort
Bliss and had arrived at Wright Field, General Twining had flown back
from New Mexico to Wright to oversee the analysis and evaluation of the
Roswell treasure trove. Twining moved quickly once back at
his office. The alien bodies had to be autopsied in utmost secrecy and
the spacecraft and its contents analyzed, cataloged, and prepared for
dissemination to various facilities within the military. In as much as
everything about the crash was given the highest security
classification, stories had to be prepared for those with lower
security classifications but whose contributions could be important to
the creation of a credible cover story.

The official camouflage was almost as important to the
military in1947 as it was in 1961 when I took over. It was important
because as far as the army was concerned, 1947 was still wartime, a
Cold War, perhaps, but war nevertheless, and stories about military
hardware as valuable as the material retrieved from Roswell could not
be disclosed for fear that the Soviets would exploit it. Thus, from day
1, the army treated its retrieval of the debris as if it were an
operation conducted in a wartime theater under battle conditions.
Roswell became military intelligence.

General Twining had seen the material for himself, and even
before he returned to Wright Field, he’d conferred with the
rocket scientists who were part of his brain trust at Alamogordo. Now,
during the remainder of the summer months, he quietly compiled a report
that he would deliver to President Truman and an ad hoc group of
military, government, and civilian officials, who would ultimately
become the chief policy makers for what would become an ongoing contact
with extraterrestrials over the ensuing fifty years. And as stories of
the Roswell crash and other UFO sightings around U.S. military bases
began to filter in through the command chain of the armed services,
General Twining also needed to establish a lower security channel along
which he could exchange information with other commands that were not
cleared all the way to the top.

General Twining still reported to higher ups who, though they
may not have had the security clearance he had with regard to
extraterrestrial contact, nevertheless were his commanding officers and
routinely sought information from the AMC. Accordingly, General Twining
needed to maintain a quasi cover-up even within the military.

The first of these reports was transmitted from General
Twining to the commanding general of Army Air Forces in Washington,
dated September 23, 1947. Written to the attention of Brig. Gen. George
Schulgen, Twining’s memo addressed, in the most general of
terms, the official Air Material Command’s intelligence
regarding “flying discs. ” He drew a remarkable
number of conclusions, most of which, I had to surmise when I was on
Eisenhower’s National Security Council and then again when I
got to the Pentagon, were based on Twining’s own first hand
experience with the sighting reports from Roswell and other sighting
reports as well as the materials themselves, which were in the
military’s possession.

Flying saucers or UFOs are not illusions, Twining says,
referring to the sighting of strange objects in the sky as
“something real and not visionary or fictitious. ”
Even though he cites the possibility that some of the sightings are
only meteors or other natural occurrences, he says that the reports are
based upon real sightings of actual objects“ approximating
the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to be as large as man
made aircraft. ” Considering that this report was never
intended for public scrutiny, especially in 1947, Twining marveled at
the aircrafts’ operating characteristics and went on record,
drawing major conclusions about the material he had and the reports
he’d heard or read. But, when he wrote that the extreme
maneuverability of the aircraft and their “evasive”
actions when sighted “or contacted” by friendly
aircraft and radar led him to believe that they were either
“manually, automatically, or remotely” flown, he
not only suggested a guided flight but imparted a hostile intent to
their evasive maneuvers to avoid contact. His characterization of the
aircrafts’ behavior revealed, even weeks after the physical
encounter, that those officers in the military who were now running the
yet-to-be-code-named extraterrestrial contact project already
considered these objects and those entities who controlled them a
military threat.